Many improvements to the River Device, including the ability to easily add new vertices to the defined path by dragging on it; setting the start and end elevations if you're not using a defined elevation gradient/datum; and fixing the corrugated look to the floodplain in some instances.

Fixed curvature sensing in river device which produced bad results on high res builds

I feel that there might be some confusion as to the purpose of the two release channels:

The Dev Channel is very much a public release!

The Release Channel should be considered to be the "reference edition" of WM; It is the intentional "slow change" branch, intended especially for institutional users, etc, who don't want to deal with constantly changing functionality or fixes. The release channel by design should receive only major, benchmark releases plus bugfixes. I would expect "major revision change" drops on the Release Channel to happen somewhere between every 12-30 months, corresponding to what would classically be a new major version : WM 3, WM 4, etc.

The Dev Channel receives frequent updates, new features, etc as fast as I can get cohesive change-sets out. The Dev Channel is the primary point of having yearly upgrade access! Rather than wait three years for a new version, you can use a feature right away if its useful to you.

If you do not want or need this access, there is less reason to have a renewal, I agree. Since there is no "catch-up" or penalty applied if a upgrade license lapses, paying for an upgrade license once every two or three years when the major version you want drops provides you a substantial savings. Conversely, if you do want early-access to new features, the upgrade license is priced reasonably; the pricing was set to approximately 1/2.5 of the new version price, assuming a new version every 2-3 years which is fairly typical. In this case you're essentially paying what you would have before, but get access to features years(!) before you would have previously.

There should be no way for this system to come out worse for the customer than the previous one, which was one of my main goals in the first place! Even in the worst case of always paying for maintenance and only using the Release Channel, you will still end up, on average, receiving the same benefits and costs as the old system. It clearly is not being presented well however, because there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding and angst around a change that was intended to be a complete slam-dunk win-win.

If you would like to cancel your upgrade, please contact me at [email protected] and I'm happy to oblige.

I want this version, but I want the stable release, as it crashes a lot on Windows 10 x64.. But I don't feel like I should have to pay another $99 to get it, as I already paid $99 to get this version, that's buggy..